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Friday fun for the IT crowd: It's Oracle's world

September 26, 2014

Oracle OpenWorld (OOW), one of the largest IT conference in the world, always makes waves. For instance, the CEO bailed on his own keynote speech to watch his World Cup team sail. But while OOW 2014 doesn’t start until Sunday, the company’s biggest news came last week when founder Larry Ellison announced he’ll step down as CEO of the enterprise software giant. He’s not going far, though. The 70-year-old Ellison will chair the board and also take on the chief technology officer role.

But don’t worry, Ellison isn’t feeling bad about his self-imposed demotion―or poor. The man’s fifth-richest man just bought the island of Lanai Hawaii. Not a beach house on the island, but a whole island. He has an interesting vision for the island of about 3,000 inhabitants, complete with photosynthesizing algae and advanced irrigation techniques designed to make Lanai self-sustaining.

The second-most-interesting news also began before the conference, when new co-CEO Mark Hurd, formerly chief of HP, announced that Oracle will go after Microsoft’s cloud business. It seems that Oracle is getting serious about the cloud, with a new platform-as-a-service on which Java developers can build new apps. Tune into the conference for more details.